4:35 pm

Wed April 8, 2015

John Hancock announced a new program promising discounts for policyholders who wear a fitness tracker, exercise more and go to the doctor. The life insurance company says that if people live longer healthier lives, everybody wins. But privacy advocates worry about all the electronic monitoring.

Goats and Soda

4:13 pm

Wed April 8, 2015

Rio has hosted competitions that include athletes with physical impairments (above: the open water swim at Copacobana beach for the Rei e Rainha do Mar). But there's never been an event on the scale of the Paralympics.

For most disabled residents of Rio de Janeiro, every day is an Olympian struggle.

Pick almost any sidewalk, says Lilia Martins, who uses an electric wheelchair. She chooses one just outside her place of work. The location is relevant because Martins is an advocate for disabled people in Rio. Even here, we only manage to go a short way before the pavement becomes cracked and broken with huge roots popping up. There is literally no way a wheelchair can go on. It's like an obstacle course.

Before a couple commit time, money and emotion to the process of in vitro fertilization, they want to know one thing: What are our chances of having a baby?

Success rates vary dramatically by age. In 2013, for example, 40 percent of IVF cycles performed in women who were under the age of 35 resulted in live births, compared with 4.5 percent for women older than 42.

Would you lead a more active lifestyle if it meant lower life insurance premiums? Insurer John Hancock and Vitality, a global wellness firm, are hoping the answer is yes. But there is a condition: They get to track your activity.

The practice is already employed in Australia, Europe, Singapore and South Africa, where Vitality is based.

Welcome to the 2016 presidential campaign. Republican Rand Paul officially entered the race Tuesday, and was greeted with a TV ad calling him "wrong and dangerous" on Iran. The money behind the ad is secret.

They are not blue jeans. They are not slacks. They are not chinos or khakis.

"They're like a jogger," Lee Davis says of his pants, walking through an outdoor mall in Los Angeles called The Grove. He's wearing them with a professional black cardigan over a designer white tee, with a crisp fitted baseball cap and fancy tennis shoes. The pants stand out the most. They fit him impeccably, with clear, tapered lines and a high-end, light-khaki material that flows luxuriously.

Pushed to the brink in an unprecedented runoff election, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel used a huge campaign war chest and a softened image to survive the threat and win a second term in office.

Emanuel defeated Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, who had championed the city's poor and disadvantaged in hopes of becoming Chicago's first Latino mayor, in a race that mirrored divisions between the "Wall Street" and the liberal/progressive wings within the Democratic Party nationally.

In official totals, Emanuel won nearly 56 percent of the vote to Garcia's 44 percent.

The Salt

5:29 pm

Tue April 7, 2015

Fields of carrots are watered March 29, 2015, in Kern County, Calif. Subsidized water flowing in federal and state canals down from the wet north to the arid south helped turn the dry, flat plain of the San Joaquin Valley into one of the world's most important food-growing regions.

Homeless shelters in Seattle, one of the nation's wealthiest cities, turn people away each night. Wait lists for low-income housing are years-long. Cars and tents serving as makeshift homes can be spotted all over Seattle and the rest of King County.

Across the U.S., more than a million Americans wound up in homeless shelters in 2013, according to the latest numbers from the Obama administration. Homelessness remains widespread, but in most places, it's been decreasing in recent years.

Environment

5:29 pm

Tue April 7, 2015

The state's largest water utility is suing county boards for polluting rivers the city uses for drinking water. At the heart of the fight is whether or not farmers should be forced to comply with federal water quality standards.

At an Institute for Family Health center near Union Square in New York City, medical student Sara Stream asks a new patient named Alicia what brings her in. The 34-year-old woman arrived last summer from Guatemala, and says she hasn't been seen by a doctor in many years.

Her list of ailments is long.

"I have trouble seeing, headaches, problems with my stomach," says Alicia, who declined to use her full name, because she is in the country illegally. "I feel depressed."

Shots - Health News

4:58 pm

Tue April 7, 2015

Depending on the amount taken in subsidies, or changes in reported income and family status, some Obamacare policyholders this year will get a bigger refund than expected and others will owe more in taxes.

Tue April 7, 2015

Ride-sharing services are changing the way Americans commute, but just how big their impact is can be gauged by a report released Tuesday.

In the first quarter of 2015, Uber accounted for 46 percent of rides expensed by workers whose employers use Certify, the No. 2 provider of expense-reporting software in North America. Uber's market share in the first quarter of 2014 was 15 percent. Uber's rival Lyft accounted for 1 percent of rides in the first quarter of this year.

The Two-Way

2:12 pm

Tue April 7, 2015

Visitors to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum wait for it to reopen after widespread power outages caused many of the buildings along the National Mall in Washington to shut down temporarily on Tuesday.

Large portions of Washington, D.C., were hit by power outages Tuesday, momentarily plunging the White House and other buildings into darkness.

The Pepco utility company says the culprit was a transmission line in southern Maryland that caused "a dip in voltage" shortly before 1 p.m. ET. The power company says there was never a loss of permanent supply of electricity, but the situation caused some customers to move to their backup systems, which is what caused the dip in voltage.

Shots - Health News

12:48 pm

Tue April 7, 2015

When the earnings of low-income consumers change over the course of the year, a family can risk losing its health coverage if it shifts between eligibility for Medicaid and eligibility for coverage on the health insurance exchanges that were set up under the Affordable Care Act.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul announced his bid for the White House Tuesday on his website. The 52-year-old former ophthalmologist's libertarian roots sets him apart from the expansive field of Republican hopefuls, most notably in foreign policy and issues like defense spending.

His father Ron Paul, also a physician, gained notoriety in the late-1980s as a presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party, but there are signs the younger Paul is moving more mainstream Republican.